Spring Fever in the Tropics

I’m tired of the story format that most of my blog posts adopt. Life is not so precise nor fitting of the traditional story line, with carefully – or arbitrarily – chosen beginnings and endings. These are my thoughts, as I’m having them:

March is a month of holidays. The March page of my calendar presents me with several new holidays/astrological events/ days of recognition every week. First there was Holi, now there’s the Wiccan holiday Ostara and the Persian holiday No Ruz. There was Purim and let us not forget Palm Sunday. Embedded betwixt these diverse celebratory days is Religious Freedom Day. It’s a good reminder and calendars are nothing if not reminders of just how busy the religious and politically-correct communities are in any given month.

It is a strange thing to own a western calendar in the east. You feel like you’re missing things that were never a big deal to you before, or, at least they were a complimentary background to your seasonal scenes.

We talked about the solar eclipse in my Thursday class (we’re sort of doing the school thing again, after a month’s hiatus). We jumped right back on the horse with a lesson about news articles. In groups the students had to take a group of simplified news articles in English and write new headlines for them. I’ve only just now stumbled across the website newsinlevels.com. It's absolutely brilliant, even if Level 1 (out of three levels, with Level 3 containing the most original vocabulary) is still a bit difficult for my students to comprehend.

For the article about the solar eclipse, the groups came up with headlines like, “A Dark Morning in London” (the article was actually about all of Europe) and “Ring of Moon in Europe Sky.” The solar eclipse will not be visible from Indonesia this year but maybe next year we'll see it if there isn’t too much cloud cover. While this phenomenon wasn’t present from our neck of the beach, it was present for me in the digital news sphere, as was a heightened appreciation for the official first day of spring.

Spring is a time for traveling, for growth and above all, it is a time to die to the past and be reborn to the future. Even if I am not able to witness all the symbols of life and rebirth that Nature usually displays here in these equatorial climes, I still follow the same cycles I’ve followed for 23 years past.

My music and literature choices of late follow the theme of travel and I've spent more afternoons outside this week than I have in the last two months (although that may also be because the rainy season has just now ended). It is not only a desire for motion which this ghostly demarcated season stirs within me but also momentum. Momentum as in the crest of some energy, not the ending and subsequent beginning of a new trajectory.

Beginnings are difficult to record and can’t be assigned to a particular date on a calendar. A beginning is a feeling that comes over you when you’re leaving  some place or thing behind. It is that lightning moment of internalization, when experience and pre-conceived but as yet un-felt thoughts mold together. Beginnings are just paradigm shifts and endings, well, they’re only there so we don’t exhaust ourselves.

I find that beginnings usually happen in the middle of things, when you have some momentum. Even in the Cap Go Meh festival I spoke of in my last blog post, the 15 days of the new year are spent in transition, appreciating the blessings of the year past and praying for more blessings in the year to come. Their whole tatung festival was a sort of spring cleaning of residual energies in order to  be spiritually recharged for the coming year. They celebrate the transition, recognizing where they've been and where they're going.

Although it’s a bit stagnant activity-wise at site and there are still drizzly afternoons spent watching the dull river dance with small pinpricks of light, I feel a change in the air. It is a predictable change, but one that never loses its novelty.